


It's all behind you when you do catch on

by luna65



Category: The Cars (Band)
Genre: Gen, Metafiction, Soulmates, surreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21979006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luna65/pseuds/luna65
Summary: In death as in life, Ben views himself reflected in various warped mirrors.
Kudos: 1





	1. the woman in the Park

**Author's Note:**

> This is a strange idea I suspect, but of late I’ve really been obsessed with the idea of how collective fantasy can warp the reality of a particular personality. Especially one which exists **only** in our fantasies, because the actual person is long gone. In essence, just another metafictional exercise for your edification.
> 
> _I’ll be your mirror_   
>  _and you won’t_   
>  _hesitate._

This was a long time ago, taking Shauna for a walk in the park. He liked to be outside in the sun, the way the grass smelled and the breeze felt like a teasing caress. He saw a slim athletic-looking woman and she was...running? What did they call that new fitness fad? Oh yes, _jogging_. She was jogging. He’d never seen anyone jogging before. He was fascinated, even as he’d never do it. He remembered basic training and shuddered. Oh no, he was a man of action, but he preferred to physically expend himself in a way which was purposeful. Walking his dog, hunting in the woods, swimming, even manual labor - all rewarded his efforts.

But there was something intrinsically benevolent about her, he could tell. Like she had an aura of nurturing about her. He believed in auras, though he had never told anyone, not even Ric. Though he thought his best friend might consider the idea, at least. The other was interested in any number of _outré_ ideas to consider, if not necessarily believe or adopt. And she was _good_. Ben crouched down and spoke softly to his dog, pointing in a subtle way. She bounded toward the woman, always eager to do her master’s bidding. He followed, just a hint of a smirk gracing the mouth women could never resist.

The woman started at the sight of the large white dog running towards her as if they had suddenly found themselves in the tundra rather than a city park, but Shauna halted a few feet away, settling on her haunches and panting.

“Shauna!” Ben called, though it was only a line in his script, and she knew that.

“Oh is this your dog?” the woman asked, rising to her feet. She had what his Midwestern relatives would have referred to as a _handsome_ face. Not pretty, not even particularly feminine. But there was a sense of fierce protective regard coming off her in waves, he could feel it washing up against him like heat from a grate.

“Hi, is she bothering you?”

“Oh no, she’s beautiful. Can I pet her?”

“Of course.” They moved over to the bench and Shauna obediently offered herself. Though the woman appreciatively caressed her thick white fur, she gaped at the owner.

“Do I have something on my face?” Ben teased.

“You have...your face on your face.”

He laughed, what a whimsical thing to say. She cringed and blushed. _Coltish_ , that was the word he had been looking for to describe her. 

“Oh I’m gushing, sorry. I do that, though I usually don’t admit to it. I’m really wishing I could shut up right now.”

He gave her his best smile and she put up a hand like when the sun is too bright.

“Oh wow...how are you doing that?”

“What?” He continued to smile, bemused because he knew, even as he didn’t know how he was doing it either. Shauna whined at him, a doggie reprimand.

“You’re _glowing_.”

Ric had told him that, one night. They had played their usual gig in the back room of The Idler to a particularly raucous crowd and when they were done they had looked at each other, buoyed by the response, and he had done the same thing, raised his hand as if the light bothered his eyes.

“Look at you,” he murmured. “You got a _glow_ , man.”

Could people _pull_ it out of him, maybe? The right people? The people who were trying to see who he actually was?

“Are you training for something?” he asked, not knowing how to pursue the other path of inquiry.

“I think I am. I’m going to be your champion, someday; or one of them, at least.”

His eyes went wide and it was like he could see her falling into them, like he was viewing them both from a distance and she moved towards him like a plant to a light source.

“Do I need one?”

“You will. People will stop thinking about you like they should.”

She was so intensely earnest, she reminded him of the people from his old neighborhood, people who were just trying to live their lives the best they could. Who told him he was a good boy, even though he was chasing a crazy dream. She burned with the holy fire of a true apostle. He knew what that was like, had found his calling in the same fervent belief of a path personified in a kindred soul.

He shrugged, his pragmatism always just below that shiny surface. “Maybe that’s how it should be.”

“Oh no. No no no. You deserve **all** the love.”

Oh, he’d had it. From so many. From one after another after another. He worried about **all** the love; like with anything, _all_ of something was probably **too** much.

But he couldn’t discourage her, she had taken out her heart and offered it to him, so strong and beating in a rhythm he thought he could recognize.

Shauna barked and the spell was broken. They were alone, looking out at others passing by, and Ben wondered if he’d been dreaming again. A sunny day provoked daydreams of normality, just as he considered what kind of dreams the world was having about him now.


	2. the woman who was in love with Death

Some other when, at a time when you could still smoke in bars, and he walked into one in Atlantic City and found her there. She sat at one end alone with an espresso and a cordial glass in front of her. She was like a cut-rate Sophia Loren, zaftig earthy peasant body and enormous tits. Dark hair and eyes, a weird gap in her front teeth. The dim lighting was kinder than it should have been to her face. Her left arm rested on the bar and he noticed she had a tattoo of a bass clef. That caught his attention.

“Do you play?” he asked her.

She stared at him for a long while before answering. It wasn’t an answer.

“You are the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.”

And he wanted to ask: _Tonight, you mean? Today? This week?_ She had that vibe, an aura (He was good with auras, did I mention?) of someone who was always finding beautiful men to gape at.

“Thanks.” His tone was light, patient with the gauche reactions of strangers. “Do you play guitar?”

“Not really... _well_. I keep trying, but I think I like the idea of playing more than the actuality.”

Ben chuckled. Well that was... _honest_.

“Why did I say that? That wasn’t what I meant to say.”

“Truth serum in your glass, maybe?”

“Amaretto, actually.”

He nodded and flagged the bartender, asking for a beer and a shot. She asked for a white wine spritzer. He took the seat next to her.

“Drinkin’ alone, huh? Problems?” Her voice was artificially mannered, just barely managing to rein in the native accent which flavored certain words.

“Not particularly,” he replied, handing money to the bartender when served. “You?”

“Are you sure? ‘Cause I can tell you’ve got a rough road ahead of you.”

Ben wanted to laugh, because he’d already been through the wringer, several times. And what was different about one downturn of fortune from another? That was life.

“No rougher than usual.”

She shrugged. “Me, I could die any minute.”

“Oh yeah? Last I heard, so could anyone.”

“Oh I _really_ could. I don’t like to talk about it, though.”

Ben did laugh that time, realizing it was rather cruel but this conversation was weirder than most, even for him.

“So why haven’t you?”

She shrugged. “Fate, I guess. She’s a bitch.”

“To let you live?”

“To let me live without knowing how much time I have left.”

Should he give her a motivational speech? But no, he could tell by her aura she was stuck in her own obsessive justifications. He knew what that was like.

_How did I get so good at seeing people’s auras? I don’t remember being able to do it yesterday._

Ben lit a cigarette for something to do. She made a face at him and he smiled.

“Everyone needs a vice.”

“Funny enough - not funny ha-ha - that’s **not** gonna be what kills you.”

“Do I get hit by a bus, what?”

Her broad features creased with concern. “Oh I can’t tell you, that wouldn’t be right.”

_Who the fuck are you, anyway?_

“Do you know who **I** am?”

“Right now, no. But I will know, later. Later I will say I **did** know who you were, then. That I loved you then. But I didn’t.”

“Do you _want_ to know?”

“I couldn’t. Too much tragedy, it would be too devastating.”

“Okay - so let’s talk about you.”

“I’m a writer.”

“Oh yeah? What do you write?”

“It’s the same story every time: there’s a death, usually my brother, then I meet the man of my dreams, he’s beautiful and famous, we share a brief time of passion and luxury, we go to the beach, then there’s a misunderstanding, because I’m deliberately obtuse and I never tell them I love them and then I regret it for the rest of my life because he dies. Maybe in the story, maybe not, but they’re always about dead men.”

“Why?”

“Dead men won’t ever disappoint me.”

Ben shrugged with a thoughtful pout and took a drag on his cigarette. _Makes sense._

“Do men generally disappoint you?”

She sighed. “Yes, especially the ones I invent relationships with.”

“You’d think it would be the other way around, right? If it’s a fantasy then it’s what **you** want.”

She sighed so heavily he could feel the weight of it shift the air, sending the smoke from his cigarette tumbling away from the space between them.

“I’m not allowed to be happy.”

“Because of the death thing?”

She nodded and took a healthy drink of her wine. “This is _exactly_ how it would happen,” she whispered.

“Well I’m sorry if you feel like you can’t be happy. I actually try to do that, I want people to hear my music and smile, y’know? Like how music makes **me** happy.”

She heaved another dramatic sigh and then smiled. There was something artificial about that expression too.

“Of course, you are so kind and giving and... _perfect_.”

Christ, was this going to follow him around like a bad penny? The shiny facade of a normal guy, who might possibly have some talent, some luck, some genetic lottery benefit. He remembered something Dave had told him one drunken night in the year before the year they were delivered from the hinterlands of yearning and striving and endless circles of stalled trajectory.

“I look at everything like it is its’ own thing, man. When I look at you, it’s really hard not to be seduced by what comes in my eyes. You keep everything else tucked out of sight and it’s like the sirens - someone’s gonna steer themselves right on those rocks. Crash on that beautiful face and wonder what the fuck happened.”

He had blinked crystalline blue eyes and thought _whaaaaat does **that** mean?_ Dave could get weird when he was loaded. But maybe somehow he **did** know. He just couldn’t understand it, not in the way he should. Not even Ric really wanted to explain it to him, it made him flustered to even try.

“But you don’t even know me.”

“Oh I can tell,” she said. “Even now. And because I am in love with Death.”

So that was it...she saw his death lurking somewhere within, that was the attraction. The _real_ attraction. Every time someone saw what they wanted to see in him, whatever it was that he wasn’t, when he couldn’t embody that thing they were so _disappointed_ , like he had betrayed them somehow. 

And maybe he had. But there would be a time when it wouldn’t matter anymore. 

When he would be _perfect_ , forever. When all that would exist were memories and pieces of notoriety.

He looked at her again, she smiled like she was trying to be coy. But he could see it, what her aura was revealing to him.

“In a couple years you’ll just find some other dead guy, right? You’ve done it before. And I guess that’s okay.”

She sighed again, winding up to deliver another pompous pronouncement. Because he knew he was dead to her he could give up the pretense of pleasantry. He raised a hand, stopping her retort.

“Save it, but for fuck’s sake don’t make me perfect, because that’s just _ridiculous_.”

“But I **am** ridiculous,” she replied, then clapped a hand over her mouth.

He laughed so hard it seemed he could feel the pain of his future passing. But it was worth it.


	3. the Misfit Kid

In the beginning, there was only joy. There was an instant felicity. _Harmony_ , he liked to call it. Ben had been lost, wandering a landscape absent of all he had once known, a world which had moved on from his moment in the sun. And then - Fate (who may or may not be a bitch) had delivered unto him a lanky, intense and also intensely sensitive savior, with the most captivating eyes he’d ever seen. Blue like fathomless love and loss and also the ache of desire.

When later his best friend wrote the phrase _suede blue eyes_ and everyone had thought it was about him, he knew the real inspiration stared back at the author in the mirror every day.

Eyes blessed with the sight of the future, if not necessarily the map to get there.

It was always a mystery, but also none at all.

Time flits forward, the film of their glorious tale jumps the sprockets, _flicker flicker flicker_ until it’s a future he doesn’t recognize, and there he is. For some reason all alone, and yet, that is his natural habitat, his native inclination. His best friend, seated alone in a sidewalk cafe, so small and tucked away that no one seems to know where it is, save the people who are meant to know. He is seated outside in a gathering gloom, his coffee and cigarettes to hand, doodling in a notebook. His hair is pulled back, perhaps to fool whoever it is that might see him, but can’t actually see him, as he is in a kind of stasis. But Ben knows...oh, it’s him alright, his persona and image might as well be fossilized amber for all that it hasn’t changed, is perfectly preserved.

He seats himself in the opposite chair and watches, waiting for the other to look up. But when he does, there is no recognition, not even of another body occupying this bubble of solitude. And he is back to those cold years again.

Ben knows, by sitting there and feeling everything there is to discern, that there is no one else allowed to be as close to this man as he had been. The heartache still a continual if soft pulsing in his emotions, the ache of loss, the hollow ache of a dream crushed to dust.

Didn't he do much the same? Alone, not desiring the companionship of anyone who did not immediately comprehend. Once you’ve had that, nothing else will **ever** be good enough.

For that is what **he** feels now, invisible and cold, an ache. Regret, even as he might not know the words to that song. A song of forgiveness, a song of admission. The melody of redemption.

Someday, this man will write **him** a song, if not admit that he’d been writing about him all along.

Alone.

 _You never have to be alone_ , he said and was not heard. Not even a whisper which the other might have mistook for the wind, or some distant sound of the city. _You never have to wonder, you would already know._

Because what Ben knows now, in this desolate future, is that everything is lost.

Until it will be too late to rejoice in being found.

He wishes it could be like they were meeting again for the first time. That he could have one of those odd conversations with the person who believed in him just as fervently as he believed in the other and their shared dreams.

_“You like to draw, huh? Could you draw me?”_

_“I don’t like portraits, they’re so limiting. Whatever really makes a person is under their skin. Painting their inner ugliness, that’s the truth of it.”_

_“Does **everything** have to be ugly?”_

_He could see it: the sad smile, the walls of emotional distance._

_“Eventually.”_


	4. the chorus of Harpies

“Neither of you could have stood to be married to me,” Ben said, meaning to shock the two women seated across from him. One of them snickered, the other clutched some imaginary pearls.

He couldn’t tell if this was the same bar or somewhere else, somewhen else, but the woman from the bar was there, along with another woman previously unknown to him. Plain, mousey-brown hair, a rounded face. He’d call her ordinary if he was being charitable, dumpy if he wasn’t. She didn’t seem particularly concerned what he thought. She was drinking coffee, as he did, and wrote with sloppy printing in a lined notebook. His previous companion drank tea and seemed as though she was trying her best not to acknowledge the other. He was tempted to observe _I see you haven’t died yet_ , but refrained.

“Do you two know each other?” he asked.

“We did,” the woman who was new to him said.

“You are **dead** to me,” the other shot back, her voice raised and her accent fully on display.

The coffee-drinking woman laughed. “If I was, then you’d like me. But I was never particularly existent to you in the first place. Thus your ire was totally out of proportion to the situation.”

“If I’m intruding on something -”

“No!” The dark-haired woman laid her plump hands on the table, the nails painted the color of dried blood. “ _You_ are the reason **I’m** here.”

“The reason we’re _both_ here,” the other added.

“It’s always about _you_ , isn’t it? You never stop talking about yourself.”

“I’m rubber, you’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.”

“Ladies, please.”

Silence intervened for a few moments. The artificiality of the situation began to occur to him the longer he looked around at their environs.

“This is your doing, isn’t it?” he asked the coffee-drinking woman.

“‘Fraid so.”

“Where are we? And when?”

“We’re in a diner in my hometown. It doesn’t exist anymore, but I used to come here with my grandma. And it’s, oh, say, 1983. For you, anyway. For us it’s now.”

“What’s it called?”

“The Mission. Because one of the streets it bordered is Mission Avenue.”

Ben nodded. He took out his cigarettes and his previous companion looked annoyed.

“I wish you’d stop doing that!”

“If it’s 1983 that means I can smoke indoors.” He lit up and the other woman pushed a glass ashtray over to him. “Classy,” he said with approval.

“I’m here to say maybe you shouldn’t be so hard on her; after all, it’s all she has, you know. Fantasies.”

“Your life is an **empty sham**!” the other insisted, raising her voice again.

The coffee-drinking woman rolled her eyes and took a sip. “Whatever.”

“You really are a harpy, aren’t you?”

His previous companion blinked dark eyes at him, her face falling. “No, I’ve been nothing but respectful to you. Loving, only ever meaning to honor you.”

“We’re _all_ harpies, Benny O,” the other said, as the other gasped in shock.

“Don’t call him that!”

“It’s true, though, we all think we’re honoring your legacy and all that bullshit, and maybe we are in our way. But honestly, it seems more like there’s just all these women fighting over the scraps of your consensual illusion. The women who _actually_ knew you, they’ve got better things to do.”

“And here’s to ‘em, every one,” Ben declared, raising his cup of coffee. The coffee-drinking woman raised her cup and clinked the other.

“But don’t you think,” said the coffee-drinking woman to the tea-drinking woman, “that if you _really_ wanted to honor him you’d do better than generic romance novel claptrap? I mean, you write the same story every goddamn time, just *insert dead guy here.*”

“Well, to her credit she admitted as much to me,” Ben stated.

The coffee-drinking woman toasted the tea-drinking woman.

“At least I’m doing something! What are _you_ doing?!”

“Oh don’t act like you don’t know.”

“Look, I don’t care, really. I know I said not to make me perfect, but if that’s what ya need, then I guess it’s okay. If none of the dudes you know are perfect and you want them to be.”

“Not a goddamn one of them,” the tea-drinking woman retorted.

“I know a few near-perfect ones, but, well, they always get snatched up so quick.” The coffee-drinking woman laughed at her observation and scribbled a few more lines in her notebook.

“Ain’t that the way,” Ben said, smirking. “But ya know, I’m dead, right? So what do I care?”

“Yeah, you are. I’m sorry about that,” the coffee-drinking woman said.

Ben shrugged. “At least you made me look good, I appreciate that.”

“Of course, it’s the least I can do.”

“Oh my god, can we please stop talking about _you_?! Everything is always about **you**!”

“Can’t you just write her out of this?” Ben asked.

The coffee-drinking woman shook her head. “No, you see, this is also why we’re here. There’s a hole in the metafiction that she created with what she’s doing. I’m trying to fix it, but I don’t think I can. I think you’re going to have to go off with her, go to the beach and _make love_ multiple times, and die in her arms. Die _again_ , I mean.”

“I’m a romantic guy, so sure, I know the moves.”

The tea-drinking woman sighed, her eyes glistening with tears. “Oh Benjamin -”

He held up a hand. “I’ll go, but not yet.” His eyes shifted to the coffee-drinking woman, intently scribbling. “Is this Hell?”

She chuckled. “Nah, it just feels like it is.”


	5. Knight of Wands

_He is fire_  
_A fire which moves through the landscape, consuming desire_  
_The dry kindling of desire_  
_Tended by all who seek his light, his warmth_  
_The dance of the flame_  
_The dream and the fantasy of lying beside his blaze._  
_O the Knight, rearing on his steed_  
_Clutching the instrument of his deliverance_  
_From obscurity and ignominy_  
_To set the world ablaze with his warm ways._  
_Go forth, without fear_  
_Venture forth, without a backwards glance_.  
_They await your light, your heat_  
_The glow of all you know_  
_Shining brightly to set them free._

Now **this**...this was a story he wanted to be in.

He was standing in the back of The Rat, watching himself. Watching himself become who he was meant to be.

While it was happening, it never seemed particularly special. It was good, it was convenient, it was what they were aiming for. But none of them had that starry-eyed incredulity when the ride began, all the ups and downs and loop-de-loops of their collective destiny.

But from here, and now - whenever that was - he could stand back and watch himself and think: _Yeah, that was pretty fun_. He’d never been one to look back and reflect on things. What was the point of that? The past was gone and you could only do better, hopefully, tomorrow.

“I see you made it,” the coffee-drinking woman said. Perhaps she had been there all along.

“Which is?”

“Nowhere, or Now Here, whichever you want to call it. Or just call it Boston.”

“Yeah I just might.”

“Damn you guys were good, huh? I’ll never forget the summer of 1978, those songs reaching out of the radio to grab me. Playing my cassette of _Candy-O_ on my shitty little tape recorder every day when I got home from school.”

Ben smiled. “Is that where you are now? It’s the summer of ‘79 and you’re laying by the pool and I’m singing to you?”

“That’s not a bad way to live, right?”

“It absolutely does not suck.”

They laughed, and they had been yelling at each other - because that band, it was fucking **loud**.

“Thank you. All my friends are here!”

“My pleasure!”

I watched him walk away, stopping to touch various people, not realizing that they couldn’t see or feel him. Their eyes and ears were focused upon, seduced by, the man on that stage. The band wound up, ready to plunge headlong into “Hotel Queenie,” the crowd bopping around, shaking their heads and whooping it up, while the players remained restrained, but the sound and fury which poured out of them was absolute.

_When did you change the color_  
_of your hair?_

He became more and more transparent as he moved through that space, pausing to spare another smile for himself up there, forever exquisitely beautiful. A golden boy, indeed. He _glowed_ , and I had to shield my eyes.

_When did you change the letters_  
_in your name?_


End file.
